Keyshot’s SSS

Playing around with SSS materials in Keyshot. The above are presets for skin and caramel, and using the ripped game car models from Trackmania United because they’re handily low poly which makes for faster renders.

I like the idea of Keyshot’s faked math. It’s not scientifically accurate, but it’s close enough to trick people which is exactly what I need. I mean, if games can use reflection maps on everything instead of actual raytraced reflections, why can’t I? There’s crazy speed boosts to be had with far less raytracing.

§ 4 Responses to Keyshot’s SSS

Haha, is your job at Luxion just to browse around for people who blog about things they make with your product?

If so, sweet! Also, the product is awesome; I love it.

Perhaps I’m wrong when I’m thinking that with the GPU system there has to be some bias in the renderer to prevent fireflys and such?

Is the photon mapping used for the global HDRi illumination or just the material light sources? I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the global illumination shadows were raytraced ambient occlusion. I guess, for me, it just made sense that if you have a “shadow quality” slider there must be a way of cheating and faking the math to make it faster when the slider is really low.

Please correct me if I’m mistaken, I’d love to learn more about the technology.

KeyShot is using scientifically accurate materials. Also, the KeyShot rendering engine is the only rendering engine that is certified by the CIE (International Commission on Illumination). None of the other “unbiased” render engines can make this claim.

The fact that there is a slider that controls the “quality” of the shadow is for performance purposes.

Oh, no, I don’t dispute that the materials are all physically accurate; IOR etc. are all accounted for, but even the most basic renderers usually use these numbers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that cheating is a bad thing, that’s what essentially all render optimization is. You simply can’t emulate the infinite numbers of rays & photons that all lights spit out to illuminate a scene; that’s why biased rendering use specific numbers (usually around two million).

Unbiased isn’t really more math accurate per se, it’s usually the same photon algorithms, but it’s dependent not on how many you set, but for how long you leave it (such as Keyshot does) which will keep spitting photons out until you stop it, eventually getting more and more accurate.

Please don’t take my lengthy replies as argument, I use Keyshot exactly for those reasons; that’s what makes it awesome.